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djotaku's twitter feed
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- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
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Apr
30
Mario Kart Wii
Category: Video Games | 
3 Comments
I’m writing this Sunday, but I am trying to limit my blog posts to one a day so that there can be something for my readers each and every day.
I couldn’t wait for Mario Kart Wii to come out. The Mario Kart series has been my favorite on the Nintendo and Mario Kart Double Dash is the reason why my wife bought a Gamecube. We’ve had countless hours of fun playing and when the release got post postponed until today we were pretty bummed. So today we were at Best Buy right when it opened to make sure we’d be able to get a copy. There were enough, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out by the end of the day.
The game plays well and the graphics are nice, although nothing revolutionary. Playing with the wheel takes some getting used to, but after a while it feels so natural you wonder how you ever played without one before. The new tracks are a lot of fun. The one with the bouncing mushrooms is especially neat and you’re often left wondering if you’re going to plunge into the depths instead of making it in the game.
I played a regional internet game with some other people from the US. That was a lot of fun. It worked very, very well and I didn’t have to wait long to find some opponents. My first game was against two other people. Then it informed me that in the next game we could have up to eight people. So I like how it matches you up while you’re racing so that you can have more and more people instead of just ending up doing a bunch of small races. For each match you get to vote on which level you want and then the game randomly selects one of the choices. So the more people that vote for the same thing, the greater the chance that it comes up.
I don’t know anyone with the game, so I can’t comment on playing with friends, but I imagine it works mostly the same.
Now for the negatives. First of all, the Wii remote (Wiimote) is one of the most unergonomic controls Miyamoto has ever designed! Sure, the A and B buttons are nice, but I’ve never been a fan of any games that required use of the directional pad or the 1 or 2 buttons. Mario Kart Wii requires all of these uncomfortable ones. My thumbs are left extremely sore after playing Mario Kart Wii in a way they haven’t been sore since the original Nintendo controller.
Second, I couldn’t figure out (easily) how I could play with my wife and no one else. When we did VS mode, which previous meant only the people who were in the room with you and no computer players, we ended up playing against 10 computer opponents. Worse, I can’t play GP 2 player. EVERY console Mario Kart has always allowed two players at once in Grand Prix mode. MKDD even allowed four players in GP. Sure, this is the equivalent of what happens in VS mode with all the computers, but it’s not as seamless. After every stage it takes you back to the stage selection menu. That’s just plain annoying!
EXTREMELY ANNOYING for me is the fact that, as far as I could tell, battle mode must be a team game. What I loved more than anything else in each of the Mario Karts was the battle mode. I think it was best implemented in Mario Kart 64. And what I love about battle mode is that it’s you and your (up to) 3 friends hiding from each other and duking it out. But in Mario Kart Wii you have to play in a huge team of computer players. That’s no fun! I just want to go against my friends, not some automatons! If there’s a way to turn it off, I couldn’t figure it out while on that screen and my wife didn’t have the patience for me to riffle through the manual.
Finally, and this didn’t bother me too much, most of the levels are recycled from previous Mario Kart games. I actually enjoyed playing through my favorite levels from the previous Mario Kart games. I hope there’s one cup that’s all Rainbow Roads from each previous Mario Kart plus a new one. My wife, however, is not one for nostalgia. Not with anything, and especially not with a game she just paid $50 for. (kinda…we had a gift card, but we did lose the opportunity to use it for something else) She felt they were being cheap and “cheating” and wasn’t having it at all.
Overall, I’d probably give it a 7 or 8 out of 10 on my first impression. I have a feeling it’s going to grow on me. I think after all these months we were just expecting too much from it and it has let us down. I feel they’ve betrayed some of the most important parts of the franchise - such as the multiplayer GP and the four and less player battle mode. But the game is fun to play and I think overall they’ve done a good job.
Editor’s note: I played some more and I figured out how to play VS and Battle Modes with only the local players and no computers. However, I have left the criticism above to emphasize how important first impressions are. The instruction booklet did not list how to change this (although it’s possible I skipped over that page) and it was a very small icon in the top right corner. Hello, Nintendo, you don’t change something major that’s been the same for all console versions and then hide the way to put it back to normal in a small button!
Also, I am still annoyed that unlocking of levels and characters seems to be limited to GP mode which is only 1 player. So if you want to play the Star Cup and Special Cup, you cannot do it with your friends. That’s just plain wrong. And it’s a dang shame too because the BEST, most BEAUTIFUL and well DESIGNED levels are found in the Star and Special Cup. Which brings me to another criticism I had.
Again, first impressions are very important. When you first start using the game it’s not apparent that the traditional cups that have been in all console Mario Karts - Mushroom, Flower, Star, and Special have all the new tracks and the lower selections have the remixed tracks from the old games. It just looks like they did a few new ones and gave up.
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Apr
29
Joost, the end of Cable TV?
Category: Computers, Geek Love, tv | Leave a Comment
Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta. It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype. Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology. (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!) Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand. There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content. Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.
The first and important question is how good the quality is. Well, I’d have to say that it’s at least standard definition quality and some clips might be HD quality. Because there’s some motion in this screenshot, it’s not a perfect example of the quality. But you can see that it’s not all splotchy like regular internet video.
Let’s start with what’s good about the content on Joost. First of all, they have a very eclectic mix. Here’s the featured channels screen:
And they have all sorts of great cinema offerings that are hard to get in the USA, for example, they have Bollywood, Latino Cinema, and old school Kung Fu movies:
As you can see above and below, you can select which programs you wish to watch, making it very much like on demand offerings. If you don’t know what you want to watch, you could always just hit a button and it starts playing the content one offering after another.
Now for the bad news. The content they’ve licensed from Viacom (MTv, Comedy Central, VH1, etc) is not the latest stuff that people are very likely to be interested in. It partly leads me to believe that they’ve purposely set this experiment up to fail so they can point to Hulu and say that everyone should use that instead. For example, here’s the stuff in the Comedy Central channel:
You can see that it’s a lot of standup and some episodes of “Strangers with Candy“. There are no episodes of The Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Those are, I’m sure, their most popular programs. Also missing are Lil Bush and South Park. National Geographic has some pretty neat programs, but nothing to write home about.
Again, that’s not to say there isn’t stuff here to keep you entertained. For example, they inexplicably have episodes of “Good TImes”:
Also, they have some pretty good selection in the Comedy category. The Onion News Network, for example, is very funny.
And another good thing about the service is that in the entire time that I used it, there wasn’t any skipping as I watched. New programs loaded up fairly quickly, so I didn’t have to wait too long to watch them.
So can Joost be the end of cable tv? At this point in the program’s life, I think it would have been an awesome program to have in college. (Although a lot of college students probably won’t get to try it because colleges are indiscriminately blocking P2P even if it has a legitimate use such as this) At Cornell we didn’t have easy access to cable TV in the dorms and this could have provided us with some entertainment. But to beat cable, Joost faces some heady hurdles. First of all, they need to start offering newer content. I don’t want to have “Strangers with Candy” or “Room Raiders”. I want The Daily Show and my wife wants “Rock of Love”. Also, more channels need to sign up to offer their content. Second, one way they could beat cable is by never expiring their content. Then they’d eventually have more on offer than the cable provider’s on demand. Third, they have to hope that net neutrality legislation goes through. Both FiOS and Cable companies are pretty much the only broadband providers that we have access to. If they start to notice Joost eating into their cable revenue, you can bet they’re going to start messing with Joost traffic. They’ve already gotten into trouble with this and bit torrent. After all, there are legitimate uses for bit torrent such as downloading Linux distros and getting Steam and Blizzard updates. Judges have ruled they don’t have the right to mess with this traffic, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying.
I hope they succeed because I think this can become a very attractive alternative to cable. I’m also intrigued by their ability to secure the rights to Bollywood, Latino, and Japanese movies. This could be a huge way to introduce Americans to movies from other cultures and facilitate demand for those movies in the US. I think the more cross border cultural exchanges we have, the more we will see them as humans, just like us instead of some random freaks to be invaded whenever it’s politically convenient.
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Apr
28
Having all distros release at once?
Category: Linux | Leave a Comment
The Open Source Advocate has an article discussing the merits of all the distros releasing on the same schedule. His main argument, bolstered by quotes from Shuttleworth is that by having them all release at the same time, they will end up with the same software and cause a massive synchronization across all major open source projects. The 2 main quotes I’d like to focus on are:
“Simply set a hard date and modify your goals to make that release date.” - Article Author
“We are just on a different version so someone else’s patch isn’t going to apply. There’s a bit of friction there.” - Shuttleworth
I think this is the main reason why doing this won’t work. Different distros have very different goals and so this may be a false efficiency they’re working towards. For example, Fedora has inherited Mandrake’s previous title as the most bleeding edge distro. This means that Feodra may want to be using a more beta program than Ubuntu might. Also, let’s say some distro wanted to be more for businesses so they would rather have older, tested packages. They may also want to release once per year or every 9 months or something like that.
Also, it may be more important to Novell, for example, to get a certain feature in, even if that makes them release late. Or, finally, some distros may not have the testing resources to update as often as others do. Sure, Ubuntu can update every six months on time every year. But perhaps another distro needs a little extra time so they don’t put out a buggy product.
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Apr
27
Another example of DRM being hurtful
Category: DRM, M$ | Leave a Comment
The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to. This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want. Some people will decide they got left holding the bomb with one second left for doing the right thing and paying for music. They will decide to download music without paying from now on. They will reason that if they ever buy music again they won’t know if it will cease working. Or they will being to take note of places like Amie Street and Amazon.com that sell DRM-free music.
Tsk, Tsk Microsoft!
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Apr
26
Mistranslations in the Kama Sutra
Category: xkcd | Leave a Comment
If you’ve ever looked at a reprint of the Kama Sutra, I think you’ll agree that reading it without being careful can lead to some interesting things. Such as this:
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Apr
25
It’s AWESOME! Check out the video in this post from Andrew’s blog. If you ever played the original Nintendo, you’ll go nuts.
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Apr
24
Flood Part 2
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
Here are some pictures of the flood & damage:
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Apr
24
Floods
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
The sewers backed up in my apartment flooding my bathroom via my bathtub and toilet and my living room via the front door with water full of excrement and urine. However, even in these horrible and anoying times, you still have to look at it positively. Our neighbors got flooded throughout their entire house. For us it didn’t spread of out the bathroom or living room. It was royally disgusting and smelly, but at least the cleaning crew worked through the night and morning to get our apartment to a usable state.
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Apr
24
One last, good look at KDE 3 Part 2
Category: KDE | 2 Comments
Some little updates on my KDE experiment. First of all, I run an rsync script semi-daily to backup my home drive to an external hard drive in case the main one fails. It’s already happened to me once before and I was really glad to have had backups. However, as you can imagine, this is a huge drain on my computer’s resources while the backup is being performed. Since I have it running from a cron job so that I can just forget about it, I tend to forget when it’s set to run and I get really annoyed if my computer starts slowing down and I can’t figure out why. So I put a wall command into my script. This sends a message to all terminal emulators and everyone logged into the computer via terminals or ssh. Usually in Gnome I can only see the message if I happen to have Gnome termnal open. However, KDE does something very awesome and useful. Here’s a screenshot:
That is REALLY useful if you want to send info to all users and they happen to be in a GUI without any terminal emulators open. Say, you are administering the household machine and want a message to appear for the kids to see. So kudos there, KDE development team!
I’ve also found KDE 3 to be much, much more stable than I remember it. I think the last time I seriously used it before it got messed up by my Compiz Troubles, it wasn’t yet in the KDE 3.5 series, so it used to crash a lot. But now it hasn’t crashed on me once.
So far my biggest complaint is that Kopete seems to lack one bit of functionality that Pidgin has - namely the ability to remain connected to AIM when Away for long periods of time. Now, it may be the case that Kopete is doing the right thing and that Pidgin is violating AIM protocols or something. I don’t know because I haven’t used the AIM client for about five or so years now. But, even so, I wish Kopete would not disconnect from AIM whenever I am away for a long amount of time. When I leave an away message for a number of hours, as opposed to just signing off and shutting down Kopete, it’s because I want to collect messages from friends who may be on while I’m off and will drop me an IM to say, “hi”.
Other than that, I’m thoroughly enjoying KDE.
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